behold, a beautiful published and on-display example of why archaeologists should not always jump to the most exciting interpretation:
the Kafkania pebble is a pebble found in a secure context in the rubble of a wall. it has Linear B (the written language of the Bronze Age Mycenaeans in Greece) on both sides. it is the only stone object known to have Linear B, and it predates the previous earliest-known use of Linear B by two centuries!
except...it was discovered on April 1. except the Linear B doesn’t make sense unless you translate each line going in alternating directions (which no other Linear B texts do in this way). except when you translate it, it is the name of the son of some of the excavators.
the leading Linear B scholar has published a brilliantly scathing article about why this is stupid, which includes a snarky section on the history of April Fool’s day.
Thomas Palaima ends his article by saying he’d love for someone at a well documented excavation to find a similarly early Linear B artifact “that [is] less iconographically, linguistically, paleographically and textually problematic.” ouch.
